For many years, country music was one of the shibboleths of the alternative nation: If you were born after 1950, lived in a city, and considered yourself smart and hip, you’d say you liked “all kinds of music”—pause—“except country.” There were almost as many “Country and Western” jokes as knock-knock jokes. And the folk revolution of the late sixties was remarkably irrelevant to mainstream country. (Vietnam, the great divider of that generation, pitted cowboys squarely against hippies.)
Like the new Imax film Our Country, the whole genre has too often been a self-parody. That makes it hard to take seriously, and it’s a shame. If you look no further than the far right of the FM dial, there are lots of reasons to hate country. The great decline really started in the seventies and early eighties, culminating in gone-to-seed dudes like Mac Davis, Conway Twitty, George Jones, and Glen Campbell. At the time, it was the men who were the derelicts of country music, not the women. (God bless you, Dolly, Tammy, Loretta, and Emmylou.) The same reasons to loathe country music persist today in the saccharine pop of straw-stuffed FM stars like Shania Twain, Toby Keith, and Garth Brooks. (I’ve found a simple formula to distinguish the good from the bad: If it sounds like a commercial for Ford or Budweiser, it probably will be one before long. This is bad.)
We might have dismissed mainstream country the same way we’ve dismissed classical music. In the nineties, though, something funny started to happen. Young urbanites, especially those who’d been steeped in punk rock, were forever on the lookout for novelty. Moving forward often requires looking backward; some musicians began to study older forms of folk music. Eventually, they got so far as to punkify blues (Jon Spencer, not to mention his less-deserving copycats, the White Stripes) and jazz (Medeski, Martin, & Wood and protégés like the Bad Plus and Happy Apple).
And somewhere along the line, an earnest new generation of musicians got sucked into one of America’s great and durable traditions: electrified folk, otherwise known as true blue country music. A band like the Jayhawks helped launch alt-country, with garrisons in Wilco, Joe Henry, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, and many others. For the urbane and curious, these artists opened the doors to historical country music, and, frankly, made it cool again. I think it’s fair to say that the alternative-country gang, no matter what their pretensions, helped to reclaim American country music as it was played up until about 1970—that is, before a whole lot of coke and sequins got snorted off the coffee tables of huge record companies in Nashville. Needless to say, the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris probably has more in common with Hank Williams than Keith Urban does.
Then again, so what? That rare insight may scratch a certain kind of elitist itch, but it doesn’t much explain country music today—not the brand most Americans would recognize, anyway. Which brings us to people like George Strait and Tim McGraw. Modern fans of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family likely avoid the lo-cal molasses to be heard on country radio today. Still, as off-putting as it might be to city slickers, the fact is that contemporary country radio covers a massive swath of the nation. I’ve come to think of it as a harmless little diversion—like petting zoos and the New York Yankees and Ted Turner and other easy-to-digest artifacts of life in the USA.
Sure, a song like “Suds in the Bucket” or “Live Like You Were Dying” is simply high-shine pop music sung with a bizarre (and carefully calibrated) redneck twang. But for whatever it’s worth, modern country music is admirable, at least on a mechanical level. It is some of the best-written and -constructed music today, and it makes most rock and pop seem like it was written by a sixteen-year-old. (As indeed, it often is.) This does not necessarily make country good, nor rock ’n’ roll bad.
Enthused amateurism is one of the great achievements of punk rock that was stolen from folk music, and country doesn’t want it back. In every other genre of pop music, especially rock, jazz, and hip-hop, the expectation is that a band writes and performs its own material. But even at this late date, country music continues to operate with a Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building model. A glance at the current top twenty country songs shows that more than half were written by someone other than the recording artist. Nashville is lousy with agents connecting songwriters with song performers.
The result is a specialization of labor—call it an assembly line—which makes for an end product that has its selling points. The songwriting itself is often polished and clever, and the instrumentation and production is the best that can be had from studio session professionals. What makes most of this material sound so much like pop music is that it is seamlessly orchestrated. In other words, it’s built to the same factory specs as bubblegum pop. It should sound the same. Most of it is created the same way as “product” from Linkin Park and Destiny’s Child.
Even with all the pop obfuscation, there are still certain conventions that signify a song as country: a fiddle, a banjo, a Dobro, or that twangy accent. With modern production and polish, though, it’s the last of these that is often the only identifying characteristic between country and, say, adult contemporary. I’ve long been obsessed with the “redneck” accent that rural populations affect from Mankato to Missoula, Atlanta to Calgary, Austin to Washington D.C. Some think of it as Southern or even Western, but it is a state of mind, not a state of place—the linguistic equivalent of the pickup truck. I’ve heard it from the mouths of cabdrivers and steelworkers in midtown Manhattan. I believe I’ve even heard it from the mouth of our Connecticut-born, Yale- and Harvard-educated, superrich president.
Beyond country’s musical conventions, there are the hackneyed characters, themes, and storylines that still flourish like crabgrass. Country music today reflects a certain set of values that we’ve come to associate with rural life and Red America. These read like a Republican stump speech: self-sufficiency, fidelity, hard work, a firm sense of right and wrong, family values, respect for God and country. In country music, the bad guys are always irredeemable rascals who can’t give up the bottle or the wandering eye or the rambling road. In country music, the heroes are the World’s Greatest Husband and the Most Loyal Wife in the Universe—and, in times of war, American soldiers and the Almighty, who must look an awful lot like Uncle Sam.
It’s telling that country is such a huge radio phenomenon. Country radio reaches seventy million listeners nationwide, almost half the entire adult population. Together with right-wing talk, it rules that medium. It doesn’t have as much impact elsewhere, however. Rock and pop, for example, outsell country by a long shot in the CD store and the iTunes queue. On the concert circuit, heavy metal puts to shame the box-office loot from country. But nationally, no other genre even comes close on the radio. In the Twin Cities—remember, a non-rural metropolitan area of around two million pairs of ears—country station K102 is second only to classic rock KQRS.
Country radio is especially interesting to consider from a demographic point of view. Advertisers have known forever that modern country has a huge appeal to women, particularly suburban soccer moms. I credit all those sentimental, tearjerking odes to simplicity, fealty, and family, as well as the bitter laments about cheating, lying, rambling men. Country deals in these stereotypes comfortably and openly and can always be reduced to the essential tension between the happy home and the open road, between putting down roots versus moving on West.
Nor is it surprising that, if all other music genres are infes
ted with Democrats and lefties (try to imagine a conservative answer to the “Vote for Change” lineup—Ted Nugent?), country music is the bailiwick of conservatives. I despise the equivalence of “Republican” with “patriotic,” but I’m intrigued by the simple pun offered by “country” music—country as in not the city, but also country as in nation. It is a triangulation that doesn’t always make sense, particularly with the rise in the seventies of outlaw country, on the one hand, and rope-smoking hippie folk like John Denver on the other. Then again, commercial country during that period was not particularly nationalistic. Certainly not like it is today.
If there was ever any doubt about the general political leanings of country as a whole, it was swept away in the outrage that has dogged the Dixie Chicks, ever since singer Natalie Maines made it known that she thinks George W. Bush is lower than a snake’s belly in a wagonwheel rut. It is one thing for some Euro-fag like Bono to shamelessly diss a sitting Republican president, but quite another for one of country music’s biggest stars to go all lefty. Disloyalty and dissent don’t sit well with country musicians or Republicans these days.
If you listen very closely, you can hear Woody Guthrie spinning in his grave.
Our Country is a strange, superficial overview of the history of country music currently playing at the Minnesota Zoo’s Imax theater. If you saw it, you had a good time, but you didn’t learn much. And you wondered why it was necessary to play what amounts to a thirty-five-minute music video (lightly salted with an instantly forgotten thumbnail history) on the world’s largest movie screen. You would have wondered why such a shallow treatment of such a massive subject needed to be told with six-story-high images, and you would have been left with the main impression that it was in order to show you Lee Ann Womack’s breasts the size of two Harvestore silos.
The main attraction was the music, of course— some of it good, some of it atrocious, most of it pretty conventional, all of it contemporary. More than a hundred current stars make cameos (Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, Alan Jackson, Crystal Gayle, Loretta Lynn), playing standards or dressing up like dead heroes such as Patsy Cline or Hank Williams. The overall effect of this long, uneven exercise in “Where’s Waldo?” is one of penance-paying. For all the depredation they have visited on the genre, particularly from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, the unidentified stars of the movie take their turns playing real country, or a semblance of the same. Country music, like so many other things these days, relies on a reputation for being simple and real, but it’s just show business after all, and just about as fake as a three dollar bill.
Maybe the strangest aspect of the film is how it compresses the origins of country music into a single, breathtaking, narrative-free panoramic shot of what is supposed to be Ireland, but looks suspiciously like New Zealand. Apparently, fiddles and pennywhistles made it to the New World by way of a single desperate Irishman who had his Da’s fiddle pressed on him as he shipped for Ellis Island. Thirty years later, Jimmie Rodgers invented country music somewhere in America, and you eventually get Willie Nelson, voilà!
Needless to say, there isn’t much of a storyline to this history. It’s simply a diversion between scenes in the real show—for example, an astonishingly decadent, “We Are the World”-style jam to Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn,” starring everyone from Dolly Parton to Roger McGuinn. A lovely song, but one that’s hardly relevant to the origins of country music, and not considered part of the contemporary canon. There are so many stories to tell along the way—from how country begat rockabilly which begat rock ’n’ roll, for example, or how gospel and swing were folded into various forms of country. As I say, it’s a huge story, and probably one that can’t be told in any amount of footage of any caliber.
Like modern country music itself, Our Country is pretty inoffensive. It could have been a lot worse. Even the film’s attempt to link country music with God-fearing patriotism is so slight and random—“This generation had its own Pearl Harbor” (September 11), cue “Living in the Promiseland”—as to seem absurd. I guess I can continue to ponder the paradox of what necessary connection there is between conservative politics and country music, and I won’t let it bother me that Lee Ann Womack’s barn-size breasts heave in my face as I do so. That, I think, would be un-American.
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